Most of your visitors arrive on a phone. Is your site ready?
· 2 min read
A site that looks perfect on a desktop can fall apart on a phone. A concrete way to test your own.
Someone looking for a local service usually does it on a phone — often on the move, one-handed, in a hurry. If your site does not work in that situation, how it looks on a desktop does not matter.
Testing your own site on a phone
Open it on your phone and check:
- Does it scroll sideways? If the page slides left and right, something does not fit. It is the most common and most irritating fault.
- Can you read it without zooming?
- Can you hit the buttons with one thumb? Links sitting too close together get mis-tapped.
- Does tapping the phone number start a call?
- Does the menu open — and close again?
- Do form fields disappear behind the keyboard?
Three common problems
The page jumps while loading. When images and fonts arrive late, text moves: the line you were reading slides away, the button you were aiming at drops down, and you tap the wrong thing. Google measures this; above 0.1 is poor.
A box you cannot close. Cookie notices, promotional pop-ups and chat bubbles stack up on a small screen and the close button can end up off-screen.
Heavy images. A 4 MB photo straight from a camera leaves the page blank for seconds on a mobile connection. Images should be resized and compressed before they go on the site.
How to measure it
Enter your address at pagespeed.web.dev and read the Mobile tab. Three numbers matter:
- LCP — how long the largest element takes to appear. Under 2.5 seconds is good.
- CLS — how much the page jumps. Under 0.1 is good.
- INP — how fast it responds to a tap. Under 200 ms is good.
These are the measurements Google uses in ranking. Anything red affects both your visitors and your position.
Small fixes, large difference
Most mobile problems do not require a rebuild. Compressing images, serving fonts from your own server, reserving space for elements and removing unnecessary scripts will cut seconds off most sites.